...and here's two more i'm working on right now:<br><br>J&M Flowers<br>Stables Garden Center<br><br>Can't get enough of them flower sites!!!! I guess it'll help me in the long run- it's a challenge making them all look different!<br><br>[color:orange]Hey! Wait a 'minute'....</font color=orange>

"Why go through the expense of hiring a designer to lay out a document in Quark [sic] or InDesign, when a document can just as easily be prepared in-house in Word and exported to a PDF with a click of the button," the report suggested.<br><br>We deal with a lot of this crap and I just have 2 cents;<br>• They never ever embed their fonts <br>• CMYK is a four letter word<br><br>The only saving grace is thatsince our small newspaper accepts alot of this crap, we are learning so much about troubleshooting all kinds of files. The job never gets boring for long.<br><br><br>Cheers, iRock<br>"Even though Mac Users may be only 10% of the market, always remember that we are the TOP 10%"<br>-Douglas Adams

You guys both have really slick, professional looking websites. What programs do you use? And I don't know if it is a trade secret, but what is the deal with the large graphics in segments? I assume it is for easier loading but I notice you both have taken graphics with effects on the edges like some type of pillow emboss on MacGizmo's and a rough edge on MacDaddy's J&M. And do you need special software to make the textured backgrounds so they mesh smoothly between seperate parts of a header image? I want to do something like that with my own personal site on a smaller scale. Do you use some type of program beside Photoshop to make these images and then divide them? Maybe I need to RTFM that came with GoLive 4? I am very curious. I am hoping to pick up an Adobe Design Pack soon. Checking on it tomorrow in fact. Maybe even a Print to Web Bundle. Or do either of you know of a site with this information for amateurs? Full of it tonight aren't I? I think it is the excitement of new software.<br><br>Cheers, iRock<br>"Even though Mac Users may be only 10% of the market, always remember that we are the TOP 10%"<br>-Douglas Adams

I use Adobe GoLive for building the site. I am taking a look at Dreamweaver right now, but it will be a while before I could make the switch.<br><br>For graphics, I use Photoshop & ImageReady (which comes with Photoshop as part of the install). For my site, I basically built the whole website in photoshop, with each page as a seperate layer. I then opened the .psd file in Image Read and made guides where I wanted to "slice" the images (that's what it's called when you chop up the images like we did). You can save directly out of ImageReady and it will create the web page with all the slices in place for you, or you can piece them together yourself. Usually, the html that ImageReady creates can be used as-is, but I like to go in to GoLive and "clean it up" and add things to it, like setting my margins to zero, changing page titles, adding meta data, etc...<br><br>The trade secret:<br>You will notice on my portfolio pages that most of the "slices" never change, just the area that has the pictures of my work and the headline. The logo & navigation bar never have to reload. That's because of the way I sliced the images. I made sure to keep the parts that don't change seperate from the parts that do when I sliced the image. Every page in the portfolio is sliced exactly the same. Now, when you click to the next page, the only slices that have to load are the ones with "new" graphics (the middle area). This obviously helps the load time for the web page. <br><br>The graphics:<br>I used a white box in photoshop with the pillow emboss layer effect to give it the edge you are referring to. For the background, I used a small piece of a large photo of brushed metal and set it to tile in the backround. If you really look closely, you can see about 1/4 inch outside the white area the brushed metal foreground doesn't line up perfectly with the background. It's very slight and most people won't notice it unless they are really looking close. I could have avoided that by slicing the images exactly at the edge where the white meets the metal background, but it would have been more work than was really necessary.<br><br>Oh, by the way:<br>Keep in mind that building the entire site as a bunch of images pieced together has an upside (it looks exactly the way you want it to in any browser on any platform), but also has a downside. The pages will load slower than a normal text/image mixed page. You also have to take into consideration that if you have to make changes often, you are stuck image editing, re-slicing, and re-linking the sliced images for even the smallest change. And finally, search engines can't read text in an image. Many search engines compare your keywords and meta tags with what is actually typed on the page. That tells them what the page/site is about, and it ranks it accordingly. Obviously, I'm not concerned with it because my site is already in the search engines and it must show up because I get calls from people all over the country and they always say "I found you when I searched for designers." But that will probably start to change. I rely on word of mouth for my business for the most part. I have found that for what I do, anyone who would search on the web to get a designer worth a sh!t, probably isn't the type of client I want anyway. If your website (or your clients website) depends on "search engine traffic", there are several websites that will give you all kinds of tips on how to improve it. What I did on my site is not one of them.<br><br>

Hey great. That is something I have always wondered. For now I am strictly wanting to perfect my own, but want more polish. This will give me something to aim for depending on the learning curve. My niece is meeting me tomorrow at work and we will run over to 'shop' on my break. If I can't get the Print to Web, I will get the Design bundle now & upgrade GoLive later. It will be mine, oh yes it will be mine. See ya & thanks a lot, I'm mass stoked now!<br><br>Cheers, iRock<br>"Even though Mac Users may be only 10% of the market, always remember that we are the TOP 10%"<br>-Douglas Adams

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